The life of the city : space, humour, and the experience of truth in fin-de-siècle Montmartre
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The life of the city : space, humour, and the experience of truth in fin-de-siècle Montmartre
（Studies in historical geography / series editor, Robert Mayhew）
Routledge, 2016, c2014
- : pbk.
Available at 2 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [201]-224) and index
First published 2014 by Ashgate, first issued in paperback 2016 by Routledge.
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Could the vitality of embodied experience create a foundation for a new form of revolutionary authority? The Life of the City is a bold and innovative reassessment of the early urban avant-garde movements that sought to re-imagine and reinvent the experiential life of the city. Constructing a ground-breaking theoretical analysis of the relationships between biological life, urban culture, and modern forms of biopolitical 'experiential authority', Julian Brigstocke traces the failed attempts of Parisian radicals to turn the 'crisis of authority' in late nineteenth-century Paris into an opportunity to invent new forms of urban commons. The most comprehensive account to date of the spatial politics of the literary, artistic and anarchist groups that settled in the Montmartre area of Paris after the suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune, The Life of the City analyses the reasons why laughter emerged as the unlikely tool through which Parisian bohemians attempted to forge a new, non-representational biopolitics of sensation. Ranging from the carnivalesque performances of artistic cabarets such as the Chat Noir to the laughing violence of anarchist terrorism, The Life of the City is a timely analysis of the birth of a carnivalesque politics that remains highly influential in contemporary urban movements.
Table of Contents
- Contents: Preface
- Introduction: art, life, and the experience of modernity. Part I The Life of the City: Anomalous and inhuman: black cats and the experience of truth in Baudelaire, Manet and Poe
- Order and progress: crises of authority and the pursuit of experience in the early Third Republic
- Upsetting the festival of life: humour and the politics of ressentiment. Part II The Chat Noir: Defiant laughter: humour and the aesthetics of place
- Counter-display and the exhibition of error
- The silent horror of the night: supernatural landscapes and the life of the senses. Part III Anarchism, Humour and Violence: Kings of derision: anarchist laughter and the aesthetics of violence
- Conclusion: literature, performance, and the aesthetics of authority. References
- Index.
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